“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.”

“He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes.”

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

“He was more like something out of Dickens than anything human.”

“The general effect was rather as if I had swallowed six-pennorth of dynamite and somebody touched it off inside me.”

“I tried to utter, but could not. The tongue had got all tangled up with the uvula, and the brain seemed paralyzed. I was feeling the same stunned feeling which, I imagine, Chichester Clam must have felt as the door of the potting shed slammed and he heard Boko starting to yodel without -- a nightmare sensation of being but a helpless pawn in the hands of Fate.”

“I could not but feel that it was ironical that the old relative should have spoken disparagingly of fawns as a class, sneering at their timidity in that rather lofty and superior manner, for he himself could have walked straight into a gathering of these animals and no questions asked.”